A Prehistory of the Cloud
MIT Press, 2015
We may imagine the digital cloud as placeless, mute, ethereal, and unmediated. Yet the reality of the cloud is embodied in thousands of massive data centers, any one of which can use as much electricity as a midsized town. Even all these data centers are only one small part of the cloud. Behind that cloud-shaped icon on our screens is a whole universe of technologies and cultural norms, all working to keep us from noticing their existence.
In this book, I examine the gap between the real and the virtual in our understanding of the cloud, and show that the cloud grew out of older networks such as railroad tracks, sewer lines, and television circuits.
Praise for A Prehistory of the Cloud
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But the thing about a cloud, Tung-Hui Hu reminds us in his mesmerizing new book, A Prehistory of the Cloud, is that you can only see it from a distance..... A Prehistory of the Cloud is Hu's imaginative attempt to bring this abstraction into clearer focus. It's informed as much by his current jobs (English professor and poet) as his old one (network engineer), and his approach is eclectic and unpredictable, full of unexpected riffs on Victorian sewage systems, the history of television, counterculture seekers, and the chilling final scene of Francis Ford Coppola's paranoid classic 'The Conversation.'
Hua Hsu, The New Yorker
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Witty, sharp and theoretically aware, Hu deconstructs this much-discussed but poorly understood 'cultural fantasy'.
PD Smith, The Guardian
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The realm of the cloud does not countenance loss, but when we touch it, we corrupt it. The word for such a system – a memory that preserves, encrypts and mystifies a lost love-object – is indeed melancholy. Hu's is a deeply melancholy book and for that reason, a valuable one.
Simon Ings, The New Scientist
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[T]his is an insightfully original and sobering book, one that adds an important dimension to our current academic and popular discussions of the power and effects of digital networks. Hu shows us the continuities and transformations that underlie our fictions of a neat "break" between the past and the present or between the analog and the digital.... [A] brilliant and path-breaking book that makes an important contribution to our ongoing efforts to grasp the shape of the network society in which we live.
Steven Shaviro, Critical Inquiry
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A Prehistory of the Cloud included in a list of books published in the "past 35 years that are fundamental to the development of ideas and culture in architecture."
Storefront for Art and Architecture (NYC) launched a Global Survey of Architecture Books that reached more than 1600 scholars, critics, museum directors, historians, and others from 98 countries, asking them to contribute nominations of books from the past 35 years that are fundamental to the development of ideas and culture in architecture. Other selections from the list of 135 include We Have Never Been Modern (Bruno Latour), City of Quartz (Mike Davis), and Forensic Architecture (Eyal Weizman)
Broadcast
Tung-Hui Hu interviewed on BBC Radio 4, 2020: Under the Cloud